Speaker: Greg Sanders

Passage: Luke 1

THE CHRISTMAS STORY: ZECHARIAH, ELIZABETH, & MARY

Hey, good morning, Vintage family. It is December 22, and today, we are online because tonight, we have our Christmas gathering at 6:30, and then we do another Christmas gathering tomorrow at 6:30. I’d love to remind all of you, choose one, please. Please don’t choose both. We want to make sure we have room for everybody. 

Today, I want to jump into the Christmas story. We’ve been doing a look at the different characters and the narrative of the story, and whether that’s been Pastor Dustin or Pastor Gary or myself, the goal has been just to draw out some truths from this Christmas story. And I want to take us today into a look at three characters that I think are really central to the Christmas story and it’s Zechariah, Elizabeth, and Mary, of course. 

LUKE 1

So, if you have your Bibles, go to Luke 1, and I’m going to read a pretty healthy chunk of Scripture. “It all begins with a Jewish priest, Zechariah, who lived when Herod was king of Judea. Zechariah was a member of the priestly order of Abidjan. His wife, Elizabeth was also from the priestly line of Aaron. Zechariah and Elizabeth were righteous in God’s eyes, careful to obey all the Lord’s commandments and regulations. They had no children because Elizabeth was barren and now they were both very old. 

“One day, Zechariah was serving God in the Temple, for his order was on duty that week. As was the custom of the priests, he was chosen by lot to enter the sanctuary and burn incense in the Lord’s presence. While the incense was being burned, a great crowd stood outside, praying. 

“Zechariah was in the sanctuary when the angel of the Lord appeared, standing to the right of the incense altar. Zechariah was overwhelmed with fear. But the angel said, ‘Hey, don’t be afraid, Zechariah! For God has heard your prayer, and your wife, Elizabeth, will bear you a son! 

“‘You are to name him John, For you will have great joy and gladness, and many will rejoice with you at his birth, for he will be great in the eyes of the Lord. He must never touch wine or hard liquor, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit, even before his birth. And he will persuade many Israelites to turn to the Lord their God. 

“‘He will be a man with the spirit and power of Elijah, the prophet of old. He will precede the coming of the Lord, preparing the way for his arrival. He will turn the hearts of fathers to their children, and he will change disobedient minds to accept Godly wisdom.’ 

“Zechariah said to the angel, ‘How can I know this will happen? I’m an old man now, and my wife is well along in years.’ Then the angel said, ‘I am Gabriel! I stand in the very presence of God. It was he who sent me to bring you this good news! And now, since you didn’t believe what I said, you won’t be able to speak until the child is born. For my words will certainly come true at the proper time.’ 

“Meanwhile, the people were waiting for Zechariah to come out, wondering what was taking so long. When he finally did come out, he couldn’t speak to them. They realized from his gestures that he must have seen a vision in the Temple sanctuary. 

“He stayed at the Temple until his term of service was over, and then he returned home. Soon afterward, his wife, Elizabeth, became pregnant and went into seclusion for five months. ‘How kind the Lord is!’ she exclaimed. ‘He’s taken away my disgrace of having no children.’ 

“In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a village in Galilee, to a virgin named Mary. She was engaged to a man named Joseph, a descendant of King David. Gabriel appeared to her and said, ‘Greetings, favored woman! The Lord is with you!’ 

“Confused and disturbed, Mary tried to think what the angel could mean. ‘Don’t be frightened, Mary,’ the angel told her, ‘for God has decided to bless you! You will become pregnant and have a son, and you are to name him Jesus. He will be very great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David. And will reign over Israel forever; his kingdom will never end!’ 

“When Mary asked the angel, ‘But how can I have a baby? I am a virgin,’ 

“The angel replied, ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the baby born to you will be holy, and he will be called the Son of God. What’s more, your relative Elizabeth has become pregnant in her old age! 

“People used to say she was barren, but she’s already in her sixth month. For, nothing is impossible with God.’” 

All right, I want to kind of capture two phrases in this: one is “it all begins with a Jewish priest named Zechariah,” and then the end phrase, “for nothing is impossible with God” because I think those create kind of a bookend for our narrative, and I think they’re pretty incredible. Just that phrase “for nothing is impossible with God” is where we’re really going to land in focus. 

But this story, if we look at it, is really loaded with situations that, from a human perspective, are insurmountable. What I want to draw our attention to is the literary setup. Insurmountable situations are laid out, and then we see this answer from Heaven: “Nothing is impossible with God.” 

Why is that important? I think just in that simple understanding, we realize the point of this narrative is to put human impossibility on display for the purpose of revealing the character of God. I think that’s really what Luke is trying to do here. Let me state it a little differently: the purpose of this narrative is to reveal the supernatural realm, and in the supernatural realm, impossibility is possible with Him. 

So, to that end, what I want to do is look at these situations and mine principles from the characters– from Zechariah, from Elizabeth, and from Mary– and see what we can learn as we go through our own situations that seem to be impossible or insurmountable. Okay, so let’s dive in. 

ZECHARIAH

First situation I want to look at is Zechariah. We see Zechariah have an encounter with God. Now, what doesn’t get communicated in this narrative that’s important is this is what most theologians would call the four hundred silent years. This is the tail end of it. For four hundred years, God has been quiet. There hasn’t been a prophetic voice; there hasn’t been anything that was authentic. There were a lot of voices happening, but they weren’t from God. He’s just been very, very quiet. 

I want us to understand that I think Zechariah is kind of caught off guard in this, he’s unexpecting of it, but rightfully so; it hasn’t happened for a long time. I would love to even highlight what does it look like to be a priest when your job is to lead people to God– that’s really the call of the priesthood, to represent God to man– what is it like to represent God if you haven’t heard from Him in four hundred years? 

Which means Zechariah hadn’t heard from God. Zechariah’s father hadn’t heard from God. Zechariah’s father’s father hadn’t heard from God. Generations back, they had all heard the same story: Yeah, God stopped talking. 

What I see in that, that I want us to grab onto, is that I think we should keep our ears open to Heaven even in the midst of silent seasons. In my twenty-eight years of pastoring, there’s been several times where I myself have gone through what I would call wilderness times or silent seasons. I think Rick Howard used to refer to those as the “finding times of God,” where He kind of pulls His voice back. 

And oftentimes, in our humanity, when God pulls his voice back, we kind of tap out. We’re like, Fine, if He’s not going to talk, I don’t need Him anyway. And we see a rebellion come out of us, and it begins to affirm in us this narrative of He doesn’t love me, He doesn’t care for me. 

And what I see in Zechariah is that he could have shut his hearing down. He could have walked into that Temple, same old, same old, God’s not going to speak. Why does it matter? I’m not even going to pay attention. I’m going to think about everything I have to get done this week. 

He could have done that, but he didn’t. He could have decided God’s not going to speak, why would I even think about hearing Him speak? What did he do? He stayed faithful. And I want us to learn from him in this narrative, that in seasons where it’s insurmountable and it’s difficult and we feel like God’s not talking, stay faithful. 

ELIZABETH

Second thing I want us to look at is Elizabeth, his wife, and her lifelong struggle with barrenness. Scripture says they were both very old, and she was barren. When Scripture highlights something like they were both very old and she was barren, it’s because it’s trying to draw our attention to that part of the narrative. 

Why? Because when we uncover that part of the narrative, it begins to reveal something that may be part of her humanity. I think we wrongfully strip humanity out of these stories, and we don’t look at it for what it is. 

I think probably right now, there’s people listening to this that have had a hard time with having kids or have been barren themselves, and you know all too well there’s a stigma to that, there’s a wound in that. In this time, in this day, for her to be barren, the world around her that was connected to her, the assumption was she was barren because of sin, disfavor; something she had done had caused her to be barren. 

But it’s interesting because, in the narrative, it says that both her and Zechariah were people that were righteous before God. Great phrase. In the Greek, it’s a word that means to sit across the table from another and assess them. And so what it says about her is her entire life, she’d walked right, she’d done it right. She’d been pure-hearted, she’d been clean before the Lord, and yet she’s barren. 

She’d been believing for a child for a long time. We know that because the angel says to Zechariah, “The Lord has heard your prayer and the prayer of your wife,” which means that there had been this desire. There’s a really interesting piece of etymology in the Greek, which is the word that the angel Gabriel speaks to Zechariah about “He’s heard your prayer,” the word “prayer” and the tense it’s relayed in actually leans towards the idea of Once upon a time you prayed this, but you kind of stopped praying it. 

But for Elizabeth, it seems to be very different, and I’ll show you why I think it’s different. What I think we see in her is that she had stayed faithful in the midst of disappointment. It’s one thing to stay faithful when you don’t hear God. It’s another thing to suffer a wound and go, Nope, I’m going to keep staying faithful. 

I do think they had resigned themselves to their situation, and I actually think that that’s partly why Zechariah gets punished and gets stricken mute. You look at the question Mary asked and the question Zechariah asked, and they look so similar, How can this happen? I think Zechariah’s question in the narrative leans to, There’s no way. I doubt this is possible. Mary’s question leans to, I’ve never heard of that. How does that go about? And there’s a different language coming through the text. 

Zechariah was so resigned to his fate that he couldn’t hear what the Lord said. He couldn’t hear a different possibility. Elizabeth, though, did. So I want us to consider a couple things in that. That we can, if not careful, become so convicted that what we’re crying out for won’t happen that we start to believe against the possibility of it. 

I would love to ask you a question: where in your life is that the case? Where in your life are you staring at situations going It’s impossible? Is that marriage? Is that a job? Is that a calling? Is that a sense of purpose? What are the places where you’ve looked at, and you’ve kind of just decided in your own mind it’s not going to happen? 

Elizabeth is amazing because it says that she’s barren– we know that that came with a really strong stigma, a lot of judgment– and yet her response when she finds out that she’s going to have a child is, “How kind the Lord is. He took away my disgrace.” 

And I think she jumps to the forefront as the focus of the story for me because while she doubted it would happen, she never let go of the truth that it could happen with God. She was living in a place she’s like, I resigned myself to it’s probably not going to happen, but I know that if He wants to, God can do it. 

MARY

The third person I want to highlight is Mary because we catch a glimpse of young Mary’s journey, and obviously, Mary’s at the center of the story for so many different narratives. But I really want to look at a couple things here that I think we could miss. She’s young, and she’s never had relations with a man. She’s righteous, which means she lived pure. Her integrity, her purity, mattered to her. 

Now I think we assume when we read the Scriptures, Oh, back in that day, everybody was pure. That’s not the case at all. Back in that day, sin was sin; people were just as immoral as they are now. This girl, however, was righteous. She had walked clean. It means that her integrity mattered to her. 

She gets told by the angel she’s going to get pregnant. What I love is she doesn’t freak out. She just simply says, “How can this happen?” I think she’s actually asking, How’s it going to work if I haven’t had sex with a man, and I’m not going to have sex with a man until I’m married, how am I going to get pregnant? I want you to consider that that response is different than Zechariah’s statement of Yeah, I don’t think so. I’m old, because he offers an excuse. 

There’s a side note in this I want to highlight. It doesn’t jump out in this narrative, but it jumps out in other places in the Christmas story. The angel of the Lord tells Joseph and Mary the exact same thing separately. Why? I think it’s a nod that tells us He expects husbands and wives to communicate well together about what God’s doing in their life because if they had communicated, Here’s what the Lord told me, they both would have been confirmed, and they both would have had their faith built to trust God. 

If in your marriage, you’re keeping your journey with Jesus silent from your spouse, what you’re doing is robbing yourselves of an opportunity to have your faith built. It’s supposed to be two people pursuing God together, coupling together, going, This is what the Lord is doing for me, here’s what the Lord is doing for me. And then we find that common ground, and it gives us strength. 

NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE WITH GOD

So, I want to pull some simple principles out of all three of their lives: from Zechariah’s life, learn to just stay faithful regardless of circumstance. From Elizabeth’s life, trust in the goodness of God, not in your reality. From Mary’s life, learn to surrender to God’s leadership without demanding to understand it. For nothing is impossible with God. 

Now, sometimes, when we look at that phrase, we make it too big. We make it like, Oh, that’s about the birth of the Savior, and we miss the reality that that declaration works everywhere in life. There is nothing impossible with God. When we hitch our lives to Him, when we choose to attach our trust to Him, there is absolutely nothing we will ever face– great or small– that’s impossible. 

And that impossibility doesn’t have to be about crazy stuff. It could be about simple things. It can be whatever we face that we can’t see past. Maybe in your marriage, you can’t see past a situation. Maybe in your job, you can’t see past a situation. Maybe it’s in the workplace, you can’t see past a situation. Maybe it’s personal, maybe it’s an insecurity that you just can’t see past. 

What I want us to take out of this is we, as His people, can trust His ability to work on our behalf. That’s what I see in this narrative. The three people determined to serve God, to trust His character and let Him lead them into what they didn’t understand, and in the end– please catch this– all three of them were validated for trusting God. And the same is true for us. 

So this Christmas season, maybe even just today, I would love to ask you, can you make a 100% determination to just dig in with your lives and follow Him? To put away childishness, to put away doubt, to put away the places where you’re like, I don’t really know if I can trust God with full control. 

Choose Him and conform to Him with every aspect of your life, every place where you haven’t been willing to carry the nature of Jesus, every place where you haven’t been willing to trust the character of God. Lay it down and look at it, go, Here’s why I’m laying it down. Selfishly, if I lay it down, it’s going to work for me. My life’s going to go better. So, I’m making a really selfish decision to follow God so I can get where He wants me to go. 

You see, if we take the statement “With God, nothing is impossible,” we have to take the reverse statement: “Without Him, anything is impossible.” 

So let’s put it to work. Where in your life are you struggling to remain faithful? Can you amend that and trust God with your journey? Where have you let your reality cloud your view of His goodness? Can you put the lens of His goodness in front of your circumstances? Can you choose to see tough situations through the lens of, He’s good? 

You’re like, What does that look like? It means we say, like David said, I know You are faithful, yet You are holy. I have a hard time seeing it right now, but I’m gonna trust You. I’m gonna trust what I can’t see because I know who You are. 

And lastly, probably the most important one for me, where are you fighting His leadership? I think we misunderstand how amazing Mary is at surrendering to His leadership. She basically says, You can do with me as you want. Where are you fighting His leadership because you just don’t understand it? 

Bill Johnson makes a statement that I love: he says, “If we want the peace that passes understanding, we have to give up our right to understand.” What an idea. And sometimes, if we want to be led by the Lord into things that we can’t even see, we have to be willing to lead with what we don’t know. We have to let Him take us where we don’t see. 

So, can you let Him take you into what makes no sense to you? Are you willing to rest under His hand that way? And can you hear the last line of this passage just echo in your mind? Nothing is impossible for Him. And I would say it this way, church: He is absolutely worthy of all of our trust. 

So I want to take bread and cup together, and I’m going to give you a moment to grab the elements and then come back together, and then we’ll take the bread and cup together. All right, I’d love to invite you just to take your bread, to take your cup. It could be coffee. Don’t geek out over what you’re taking. 

What I want us to consider, in absolute honesty, is, where have we doubted who God is? Where have we let go of just trusting Him? Where are the places in your life where you’ve decided He’s forgotten me? He’s wounded me, He hasn’t come through. I can’t trust what He’s asking of me and lay those down right now as we take this simple celebration of His body and His blood. 

So, Jesus, we take the bread. We take it reminding ourselves of what You did to earn this right, that You gave Your body, You were broken, and You took upon Yourself sin and shame and wounding and beating, and because of this, we get to remember and celebrate every week that every time we gather, we get to do this in remembrance of You. We get to remind ourselves that we’re healed because of You. That we’re redeemed because of You. That our histories can be transformed because of You. That every place that we can’t figure out how it’s going to work, we can trust You with it. We love You, and we honor You. Let’s take the bread and the cup.